Daily Inspiration Quote by Howard Lindsay

A producer’s promise is never a promise of comfort; it’s a contract for volatility. Howard Lindsay’s line reads like a stage-door benediction delivered with a hard smile: you want to make art? Fine. Here’s the bill. “Hunger, and pain, and sleepless nights” lands first because that’s the honest inventory of backstage life, where glamour is mostly an audience-side illusion and the labor is logistical, financial, and psychic. Lindsay isn’t romanticizing suffering so much as refusing to sell the lie that talent gets rewarded on a clean schedule.

The sly power is in the second list: “beauty… satisfactions known to few… glimpses of the heavenly life.” He doesn’t call them success or fame. He calls them rare states - moments of alignment when a show clicks, a room goes quiet, a scene lifts. Those are spiritualized, almost religious payoffs, and he frames them as intermittent because they have to be. If ecstasy were dependable, it would become payroll.

The kicker is the last sentence: no continuity, no warning. That’s the subtext every creative worker recognizes and dreads - the randomness. You can rehearse, hustle, sacrifice, and still not be “foretold” when the good arrives. Lindsay, as a producer, is speaking from a profession built on uncertainty: you bet money on taste, timing, and the public’s mood. The quote functions as both seduction and waiver, inviting you into the theater’s intoxicating highs while stripping you of the right to complain about its cruel, unforecastable rhythm.